Came across this open source video platform recently. It’s called Panda and its open source of course. Panda is an open source solution for video uploading, encoding and streaming. Unlike other video platforms, Panda is not just a service for encoding your videos for the web; Panda handles the whole process. From the upload form to streaming, Panda takes control. By providing an elegant REST API, Panda makes it completely painless to implement full video uploading, encoding and streaming functionality to your web application in a matter of hours.

• Runs completely within Amazon’s Web Servicesutilising EC2, S3 and SimpleDB.
• Everything contained within one elegant Merb application.
• Support for the encoding profiles which FFmpeg supports. They include FLV for flash and H264 for iPhone.
• Panda gem for painless integration with Ruby on Rails and Merb.
• Lovely little admin dashboard for managing your videos.

Panda is definitely something worth looking into if you are in need of a video platform of some kind. It claims to be easy to integrate. Here’s how it basically works. Once a video has been uploaded the encoding daemon will pickup the job and encode the video to the encoding profiles you specify. Upon completion Panda will send a notification back to your application to let it know the video has finished encoding and can be watched.

Visit pandastream.com for more details.

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Okay here me out for a second. I run a web design/development firm right. And a lot of the smaller projects that I service for my clients are websites built with a content management system, typically Wordpress or Drupal. The interesting thing that I have found is that each client project has it’s own unique featuers, which makes managing the content different in some areas for each project. You following me? So basically i’m having to train each individual client on how to manage his/her website. You can imagine the kind of time this would/was taking me each time I had to do it. We’re talking about a phone call anywhere between 1-2 hours. That’s some wasted valuable time. Here’s exactly what I did to streamline that process.

Step 1 = Setup Wordpress

A blog in my opinion was the perfect idea for a Video Knowledge Base for my customers. Each post would be for each specific customer. And each customer would have his/her own video. Also, I could hire someone in my organization on the customer service side who is not skilled with web design or development and can manage this content for me.

Step 2 = Install Vipers Video Quicktags Plugin

Next I needed a plugin that would allow me to stream the videos using a flash video player. The Vipers Video plugin uses the JW Flash Video component and allows you to easily point to .flv files on your server for streaming video. Very easy to use and manage with Wordpress and writing posts.

Step 3 – Using Camstudio and Making Videos

My next step was to download the free open source Camstudio software. It was very important that I configured Camstudio’s settings properly. You can see my post on how to use Camstudio for a terrific video on how to accomplish that. With my settings correct I would create videos similar to this one…where I can create a personal video message to my customer on how to use their system!

Step 4 – Convert Video to .FLV

When i’m done with my Camstudio video, the software saves the video out for me in .avi format. The next step for me to use my Flash Video Player in Wordpress is to convert that format to .flv. I downloaded the free program Flash This! To accomplish this task.

Step 5 – Upload .FLV File to Server and Post!

Pretty simple. Just upload my .flv file to the /uploads directory and uses the Video plugin for Wordpress to point to the file to display my flash training video.

Step 6 – Send Email with Link – Sit Back and Relax!

Here’s the beautiful part! All I do is send an email with a hyperlink to the video wordpress post, telling my client to watch the video and email me back if they have any questions that are not covered in the video.

After you have steps 1-4 setup and ready to go, the process literally only takes you about 15-20 minutes max to accomplish for each client. This saves you hours of wasted time on the phone or in meetings. Remember, Camstudio is a screen capturing video software, so this Video Knowledge Base would work for any business/freelancer involved in anything digital that takes place on the computer. I hope this gives you some good ideas on how you can use Wordpress and Camstudio to enhance the learning process of those around you. You can teach and train so many more people in so much less time by using Camstudio and Wordpress to display those videos!

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Camstudio is the open source screen recording software for your computer. There are many other software companies that offer to sell a screen recording/capturing software. But if you know how to use Camstudio correctly and understand some of the basics of configuring it, you’ll never need any paid software in this field. Camstudio will do the job completely for you. The following YouTube video is by far the best instructional video on how to setup and use Camstudio. It will tell you everything you need to know.

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I know alot of developers around me who are either using free trials or have even purchased programs such as WinRar and WinZip for their archiver and unpacking tools. I know that I am also dumb enough to have been using free trials of such software over the past few years for unpacking tar and zip files. What was I thinking. I came across a wonderful open source archiver for windows, linux, and mac recently. It’s called PeaZip and yes it’s open source. Thank heavens. No more free trials!!!

PeaZip will unpack and archive to and from just about any type of file format. The only ones I ever deal with personally are tar and zip so PeaZip works absolutely perfect for me. Don’t be an idiot like me and get stuck on free trials (or even worse, purchasing the actual product) when you can get a tool that’s just as good like PeaZip. Why are people selling this type of software anyways? That’s for a whole other discussion so I won’t get into that. Just check out PeaZip or click here for the link.

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Google provides a free calendar system called Google Calendar. It’s free when you sign up for your free Gmail account. This tool, along with many others, just makes Google “da bomb” I guess you could say. There are so many calendering systems that are being developed on the internet today. Both Open Source and Proprietary. So many of these calendars come with so many bells and whistles. Many of which, will never be used by most small business professionals. Meanwhile, Google Calendar has managed to build a very stable, workable, simple yet complex at the same time calendaring system that’s free for all who want to use it.

The way I use Google Calendar for my business is by managing my own calendars as well as calendars for my employees. In my Google Calendar account, I am able to setup as many calendars as I want. I can name them what I want. Then best of all, I can share those calendars with whom I choose. And best of all, I did not need to spend the time or effort, to setup or build my own calendar system on the web. Instead, I took a few seconds to setup my calendars and “bam”, I was good to go. I find Google Calendar very helpful in scheduling out my time as well as the time of my employees. I recommend you give it a shot. Click here to learn more about Google Calendar.

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The Search Status addon for Firefox is a tool that shows you your websites Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank in the footer of your web browser. It of course not only shows your sites rank, but every site you visit. I find the Search Status tool very helpful for me for all of my clients. It helps me track some basic progress on how well their site is doing in the search engines. The best thing to report to your clients is the Alexa rank since it has the ability to change dramatically depending on the effectiveness of the seo strategy of the site. Search Status could potentially be a healthy tool for you to use to make you look good to your clients.

Click Here to download the Search Status addon today for Mozilla Firefox. No it’s not available for Internet Explorer. If it was…I would’nt be giving it the time of day and writing about it.

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